


Artifacts

by praycambrian



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Ancient History, Art History, F/F, F/M, Families of Choice, Family, Food, Gen, Immortality, Love, M/M, Music, POV Multiple, Queer History, Vignette
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:27:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 3,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25471618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/praycambrian/pseuds/praycambrian
Summary: “When Andy does this, it is love,” Nicky says. “What you do is love also. Don’t stop, if you can help it.”Ongoing collection of loosely connected snippets pre-, during, and post-canon.ETA: now taking prompts! Comment with a one-word prompt I might use for a future snippet.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 136
Kudos: 383





	1. sweet

Nile knows gift-love: her mother’s care packages of sour gummies and spearmint gum, the jawbreaker kid-bribes, that one time Jay somehow pissed Dizzy off so bad it took a month of pistachio sheer yakh to win her back. 

Andy has a sweet tooth. In Oslo, Nile brings her a Thai iced tea. Andy’s thanks sits on her face like grit: brittle, glittering. She mixes in cayenne, instant coffee, one of those thumb-sized neon energy drinks that kill a hundred people a year; downs all of it. Leaves. 

“What did I do?” Nile asks.

Joe and Nicky trade a glance. “Quỳnh liked her tea sweet,” Joe says. 

Everywhere, everything carpeted with these slivers of glass. Five hundred years of mourning. Nile’s one tough motherfucker, but still, there's only so far you can walk with wounds for feet. 

“When Andy does this, it is love,” Nicky says. “What you do is love also. Don’t stop, if you can help it.”


	2. moon

After they watch the moon landing on a small black-and-white TV in Derry, Booker and Andy drink themselves to sleep on the sofa and Joe and Nico take their turn in the hostel’s one bedroom. It was Nico who asked to come here. Catholics and Protestants. To him all holy wars are part of the same penance. Joe will allow it, for a time, until the time comes for the other work they owe. 

“Imagine,” Nico murmurs. “One day human beings will think as little of flying to space as we now think of flying in aeroplanes.”

“As little as _some_ of us think of flying in aeroplanes.”

“But my dear, you have gotten much better. Now you hardly even sweat.”

His voice is so serious, so earnest: dear Niccolò’s Sahara humor. Joe smiles into his nape. “I would suffer a thousand years of flight to see you so, glowing, lit by stars. Ah, to think of it: my love standing on the very moon!”

The radiator clanks. Vehicles hush past in the wet street. “I’d be afraid to go,” Nico says quietly. 

Booker must still dream of Quỳnh, though he has not voiced this in a century. Joe imagines a darkness and pressure more absolute even than the self; imagines that, but endless, inverse. The other side of God. “Because of the nothingness?” Joe asks Nico.

“Because,” Nico says, “I am afraid I would not want to come back.”

In the other room, a bottle clinks. Andy’s low voice. Booker’s laugh flashing like a fish on a line. 

“Perhaps when we are ready to die, then,” Yusuf whispers, and Niccolò says, “Perhaps then. Yes.”


	3. dust

Again and again, Nile asks, _how old are you?_

Andy was born in the fourth year of the white stallion, the sixth of nine children, or ten, depending on how you count the stillborns, and she came of age in the summer when she chose her mount from the herd by her bloody handprint on its flank. There was a song that told the story. Once there were songs for all the years of her life: passed from mouth to mouth among her mortal kin, her hierophants, the _skolotoi_ in whom she preserved the memory she could no longer sustain herself. Their short rich lives blooming and dying like grass on the steppe’s deep bones. They invented writing in order to carry down her stories; they made it holy, and forbade its use in earthly spheres. Now that writing is lost so thoroughly none but her even know it existed. And the kurgans of her siblings’ lines are flattened and their contents have been mealed to dirt. And all of it is dust so worn it’s no longer even dust but atom. The name her mother gave her was not Andromache; that came two thousand years later, from the Greeks. When Andy thinks _mother_ , she doesn’t see a face. She thinks _méhtēr, ammā, móðir, māter, mātṛ́, mādar, móteris, motina, muti, māthir, modryb, mayr, mācar,_ and doesn’t know which word is hers. A sea of brown in her mouth. A sea of gray in her mind. In all her seven millennia, she has never found even a trace of another being that has lived as long as her.

 _Old_ , Andy says.


	4. seal

Nile comes back from a run along the Malecón with four plastic cups of fruit juice from a street vendor. Andy’s caring for her knives on the balcony, a meditation not to be disturbed; Nile leaves her cup on the table. Buzzing comes from the half-open door to Nicky and Joe’s room. Nile pokes her head in, blinks: Nicky’s sprawled on his stomach, shirtless, Joe perched on his thighs with a tattoo gun. 

“I brought juice,” she says. 

“Perfect timing,” Joe says. “He needs more electrolytes.” 

The tattoo covers all of Nicky’s back: a seal of calligraphic script in black and red and gold. Joe’s not using a stencil. _Showoff,_ Nile thinks fondly.

“Is it worth asking where you got a tattoo gun in a country where tattoo parlors are illegal?”

“Most questions are worth asking,” Joe says solemnly. Nile laughs.

“I’ll get the story later, then.” She nods at his work. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s wickedly blasphemous,” Nicky mumbles. 

“It’s one of the names of God,” Joe explains, waiting patiently for Nicky to drink the juice and settle before he lowers the needle. “ _Al-Wad_ _ū_ _d,_ the most affectionate, the ever-loving. It is an attribute of God which no human has the true capacity to embody. And yet.” He flourishes. “Embodied!”

“Blasphemy,” Nicky repeats. 

“Don’t worry,” Joe tells Nile. “Of all our sins, this is the least permanent. We heal so quickly it’ll be gone in an hour. But for a little while it’s quite a lovely exercise, no?”

“Addictive,” Nicky says, muffled by pillows and bliss.

“I could give you one later, if you like,” Joe says. “Blasphemy-free, even.”

Nile shakes her head.

“No thanks,” she says quietly. “My mom would kill me.”


	5. sword

Marie thought her name plain. She’d taken Jeanne as her confirmation name, which, as Sébastien pointed out, was rather more warlike but hardly less common. 

He only argued for the sake of the light it brought to her eyes: bright as her saint’s sword. _You are about as plain as a hawk_ , he said.

Their first son was born a week after Louis fell to the guillotine. That autumn, they battened their doors against riots, hauling the most expensive books from the shop up to their rooms above. Marie sat by the cradle with a kitchen knife. _Read to us,_ she told him calmly. 

Booker has always known himself to be a coward and the centuries have only proved it. But with Marie he could pretend he wasn’t.


	6. lemon

It takes a long time for Yusuf’s anger to abate; when it does, he begins preserving lemons. He cuts the fruit into open petals and stuffs them with salt: as much as one thinks they can hold, and then always a little more. He jars them submerged in their own juices, spiced and sealed. After a month he takes six jars to the monastery. The monk who opens the gate is not Niccolò. 

“Peace and wisdom to you and your brothers,” Yusuf says, and turns back. 

Niccolò is not there the second time, or the third. Yusuf decides against delivering letters alongside the lemons; they’ve already said all there is to be said about it. Two years in, he reconsiders. He writes Zeneize words in Maghrebi script, half caution and half obstinacy. It’s nothing Niccolò doesn’t know already and none of it has become less true. He receives no replies. 

_Have faith,_ Quỳnh tells him. Her letters are slow to arrive: she and Andromache chose to recover from the hundred years of war about who gets to be king of France by returning to Đại Việt, where, to no one’s great surprise, different princes are fighting over who gets to be king there. 

_How does it not exhaust you?_ Yusuf writes to Niccolò. _All of you. Why am I alone in wanting to leave them all to it, these mortals and their petty spoils? What right do they have to your deaths?_

Quỳnh and her burnished certainty: _have faith_. What Yusuf has is not so much faith as ritual, which is part of the problem. 

That winter, it is Niccolò who opens the gate. Yusuf drops half of the lemon jars. 

“Well, no matter,” Niccolò says, looking at the shards, then at the jars still whole. “I suppose those that remain have become only more precious.”

Yusuf wants to kiss him, and also to howl with frustration. He begins to say something bitingly clever and instead what comes out of his mouth is, “Will you come home?” 

“Will you write letters less difficult to read?” Niccolò says. “It takes me an hour to decipher each one.”

“Your Maghrebi needs the practice. Also, I am miserably bored.”

“Perhaps Quỳnh and Andromache may offer advice as to how you may pass the time, since you do not wish to pass it with me,” Niccolò says mildly. 

“Quỳnh agrees with you,” Yusuf admits. “Andromache abstains.”

“Ask again next year,” Niccolò says, closing the gate. 

“You are the bane of my days,” Yusuf calls through the hinge. “Please come home. We can argue much easier there!” 

The orchards, as if in spite, yield a slew of good harvests. Yusuf hires a family to help with the preservation and lets them sell the extra jars in markets. They prosper. Soon he need only concern himself with the jars intended for the monastery, which he insists on preparing himself.

 _I will fight alongside you until the sun darkens,_ Yusuf writes. _It was never you I doubted._

 _Please add more rosemary to the next batch of lemons,_ Niccolò replies. _I miss you._

Yusuf lets the lemons cure longer and longer, their tartness maturing, mellowing. Niccolò is slow to anger and slower to forgive. But all the faith Yusuf once spent on God and man is gathered around Niccolò, now, like spokes on a golden wheel. He will wait.

Yusuf tastes each lemon, scraping the pith away and holding the lustrous peels like windowpanes against the sky. They slip like satin on his tongue. They prepare him for the kiss that will come this year, or perhaps the next—a kiss all the sweeter for its ripening. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More [about](https://www.npr.org/2013/04/08/176577903/preserved-lemons-older-wiser-and-full-of-flavor) [preserved](https://tobysonneman.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/from-12th-century-egypt-lemons-preserved/) [lemons](https://turnspitandtable.wordpress.com/2017/02/21/two-historical-recipes-for-preserved-lemons/).


	7. scar

By the first time she dies, Quỳnh is one of the most sought-after jade workers of the southeastern coast. Her ling-ling-o are uniform, exquisite; no one has a steadier hand on the saw than her, or a finer eye for the drill. Her aunt says soon Quỳnh may cross the sea to Kalanay to learn from the masters there. 

Quỳnh and her aunt and all their company are killed by bandits on the road. They scythe through them like grass, jade-hungry. 

After, it takes less than a month for Quỳnh to fall in love with the warrior in her dreams. Less than a decade to decide she is real, somewhere, breathing while Quỳnh breathes. How could she be only a dream? She is too strange not to be alive. 

There are other women, of course. Some last lifetimes. Quỳnh makes ling-ling-o for them all: jade or copper, double-headed, precious. She buries them adorned, so that her work follows them into death where Quỳnh herself may not.

The double-headed ling-ling-o around her neck is gold. When Andromache finds her in the desert, the amulet has burned her skin so constantly it’s the closest thing Quỳnh has left to a scar. 

She’s worn it for centuries in vain, but it takes less than a year with Andromache for Quỳnh to understand, finally, why her ancestors chose to carve this shape above any other: a single unbreakable curve, two heads turned always together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More info on [ling-ling-o](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2148369/).


	8. petrichor

At some point Andy shows up with an umbrella. She holds it over them both wordlessly, her leg a stain of warmth against Booker’s shoulder. 

“Drew the short straw, huh,” he says finally.

“Nah, I volunteered.” 

Booker digs the heels of his palms into his eyes. Andy sits: the jostled umbrella shakes off raindrops bright as sap. She knifes open a bottle of wine and spills an offering on the dirt of the grave. He’s glad it’s her. He’d never wish this on anyone, let alone Joe and Nicky, but sometimes the two of them make him feel like an alien. 

Andy has a genius for silence, anyway. When Booker needs it over him like a roof, she makes herself a pillar, and when he needs it pierced she’s a needle. Like now: when he feels one more breath away from caving in, she puts one idle hand on the earth and says, “I’ve always loved this smell. Dirt after rain.” 

He makes some kind of noise. _Go on_ , or maybe, _please._

“I feel it, here in my jaw—” she gestures— “as much as I smell it. Some of the places I’ve been—deserts, steppes—that smell meant survival. We even had a name for it.” She says a word, liquid and glasslike, utterly strange. “I’m surprised I remember.”

It hooks a memory in Booker, too. “Petrichor. That’s what they call it now. Some scientist named it, I read about it a few years ago.” Booker swallows a long draught of wine, and then he says, “He loved science. Christophe, my oldest. He wanted to know—everything. I still read things as if I can go tell him about it. _Christophe, we can split the atom. Christophe, we landed on the moon_.”

Andy a pillar beside him. Booker reaches for the headstone: holds it like a shoulder. “The day he was born, they put him in my arms and he—he was so solid, but so light. Like a little animal. I was afraid to move.” 

His arms flex. Ghost weight. Andy grips the back of Booker’s neck, thumb firm on the hinge of his jaw.

“Funny, isn’t it,” she says. “What the body remembers.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [ivydragon](/users/ivydragon/) for the prompt!


	9. relic

Dr. Kozak pulls the needle from Nicky’s ribs. Her hand on the wound: doubting, then awed. The evolution of zealots in any age. She’s not likely to be swayed, but Nicky tries anyway. As she speaks with him she dips bits of his flesh into little dishes. 

Nicky is familiar with the apportioning of the body. Saints’ skulls, phalanges, rib splinters, hair. A relic for every altar. One scrap closer to divinity. Once, at Al Mansurah, Nicky lost a hand to a French sword; it took the better part of an hour to grow back. That was in the Seventh Crusade, against King Louis IX. Saint Louis, who came to Egypt to kill Muslims for God, whose boiled bones returned to France in processional to be venerated. 

Joe had insisted on burying Nicky’s butchered limb. For him, an act of devotion. For Nicky: mulching, as if of a dead fish to fertilize a garden. He was still young then. He found it easy to imagine most battlefields were like his own: moments away from revelation, ready to be love-sown and tended. 

The battlefields have buckled over the centuries—warped, shrunk, sprawled, darkened, diffused into bright antiseptic rooms—but Nicky’s never lost the habit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me clarify that Louis died of dysentery in the Eight Crusade in Carthage, which was several years after and several thousand miles away from the battle Nicky remembers.


	10. comet

Though they never ask it of him, Lykon takes the deepest watch. It’s an easy kindness. And besides, he loves the night: its stars like dust on a king’s robe, the bright white web of the great spider whose spinning formed the universe. Andromache calls that _the way of straw_. Sturdy, horse-mad woman. For Quỳnh it is the _silver river_ : lovely, shining, both liquid and fixed. 

In this manner they two have enriched his life a thousandfold, investing all the substance of the earth and spirit with new meanings of delight. 

They’re returning west along the roof of the world, on the way to Takshashila and its university: a gift to Quỳnh, who still mourns the deaths of her young, young kin twenty years before in the revolt against the Han. Once, twenty years was the span of Lykon’s entire life. Now it’s the size of his cupped hands, a unit of love from which water always spills.

He’s thinking of that—the horses warm and breathing, the dog’s ribs under his hand, his heart-friends asleep at his back—when a blazing light rips across the deep purple dark. It looks like someone from a bright room outside the world has hooked a thumb through the sky and pulled it open, a long smear of colors streaming in from beyond. For a moment Lykon is frozen in soundless delight, and then he wakes Quỳnh and Andromache, triumphantly.

They’re alert, then amused. “This is hardly your first comet, Lykon,” Andromache says. 

“Indeed not! I’m certain this is the very same one we last saw in Judea, remember?”

“That was more than seventy years ago,” Quỳnh says. 

“And the one we saw in Kush, some seventy years before that, and Tabae before that, and before that in Romsa, when you took me north to see the polar dawn—I swear they are the same.” 

Quỳnh tilts her head. “What makes you think so?”

“Each has appeared alike, with the same colors, in the same area of the sky, after the same period of years,” Lykon says, his gestures so animated the dog turns grumbling from his side. “A cycle, like that of the moon or planets, only much longer. It must be another body that circles the world as the sun and stars do.” 

Quỳnh hums. “What do you think, Andromache?” 

Andromache huffs, already lying down again and pulling Quỳnh after her. She loves sleep no less than Lykon’s grandmothers once did. But Lykon can see her gaze still turned to the comet splitting the night. 

“Perhaps,” she says at last. “I have seen many, and yet have never thought to explain them. They used to be omens to us. I suppose I forgot to find them wondrous.” 

Lykon laughs. “That is what you have us for.” 

“Indeed,” Andromache says softly. She rests her hand on Quỳnh’s cheek. “I am lucky.” 

“As are we,” Quỳnh agrees. She’s watching the sky now too, the light gleaming in her dark eyes. “I like your theory, Lykon. Maybe you’ll have an answer some day.”

“Let us hope!” 

They fall asleep again eventually, but Lykon passes the rest of the night like that: a warm yellow joy in his bones, his long future streaming before him with its many, many answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This comet is Halley’s, which was first recorded in Han China in 240 BCE, but which was presumably bopping around for a long while before that. Its periodicity was first described by a bunch of Enlightenment Europeans, but I’m giving Lykon that discovery instead because (a) he’s smart, (b) he’s got more information at his disposal, and (c) I personally find it a bit hard to believe that in the entire history of human experience, no one had ever had that thought before Edmond Halley in 1705.
> 
> Quýnh’s distant kin are the Trưng sisters, who led a briefly successful rebellion against Han Chinese rule in Northern Vietnam. (The previous Quýnh chapter situates her in the south, but let’s allow for a millennium or so of familial drift.)
> 
> And here’s more info on [other names for the Milky Way](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/how-to-refer-to-the-milky-way-across-the-globe/278506/).


End file.
